Reactive

The Modern Java Platform - 2021 Edition

Many developers were burned by the overly complex world of Java back in the early 2000s. The Gang of Four patterns and middleware / J2EE / Java EE led to ridiculous levels of alleged decoupling as is evident in this sequence diagram from an open source J2EE ecommerce system I worked on in 2002: BrowseCatalogForProduct

Back in 2014 I wrote about how things had changed: Java Doesn’t Suck – You’re Just Using it Wrong.  But six years have passed since I wrote that and things have continued to improve, making the Java platform a fantastic option when building microservices, data pipelines, web apps, mobile apps, and more.  Let’s walk through some of the “modern” (as of 2021) aspects to the Java platform.

Reactive Web Request Batching with Scala and Play Framework

At first glance it seems silly to do batching in the reactive world. When I first started with reactive programming I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about things like resource starvation. After all, the reactive magic bullet was *magical*! But my magic bullet fizzled when it hit downstream resource constraints causing me to need batching. With a reactive web client library like Play Framework’s, I can easily spin up tens of thousands of web requests, in parallel, using very little resources.

Combining Reactive Streams, Heroku Kafka, and Play Framework

Heroku recently announced early access to the new Heroku Kafka service and while I’ve heard great things about Apache Kafka I hadn’t played with it because I’m too lazy to set that kind of stuff up on my own. Now that I can setup a Kafka cluster just by provisioning a Heroku Addon I figured it was time to give it a try. If you aren’t familiar with Kafka it is kinda a next generation messaging system.

Reactive Postgres with Play Framework & ScalikeJDBC

Lately I’ve built a few apps that have relational data. Instead of trying to shoehorn that data into a NoSQL model I decided to use the awesome Heroku Postgres service but I didn’t want to lose out on the Reactiveness that most of the NoSQL data stores support. I discovered ScalikeJDBC-Async which uses postgresql-async, a Reactive (non-blocking), JDBC-ish, Postgres driver. With those libraries I was able to keep my data relational and my app Reactive all the way down.

Building & Deploying Reactive Service Pipelines — Live in Salt Lake City

This Wednesday (Aug 6, 2014) I will be presenting Building & Deploying Reactive Service Pipelines at the Utah Scala Enthusiasts group in Salt Lake City. Here is the abstract: Composition of micro-service is a modern integration pattern that couples nicely with Reactive and Continuous Delivery. These paradigms enable small teams to move quickly while integrating cross-silo data stores for modern JavaScript UIs and REST services. This session will use Scala, Play Framework, and Heroku to illustrate how to build and deploy Reactive Service Pipelines.

Going Reactive at OSCON 2014

This year at OSCON I will be leading a hands-on lab and presenting about Reactive, Play Framework, and Scala. Here are two sessions: Reactive All The Way Down (lab) - 9:00am Monday, July 21 In this tutorial you will build a Reactive application with Play Framework, Scala, WebSockets, and AngularJS. We will get started with a template app in Typesafe Activator. Then we will add a Reactive RESTful JSON service and a WebSocket in Scala.

Presenting Going Reactive with Java 8 Next Week in Boulder & Denver

Next week I will be presenting Going Reactive with Java 8 at the Boulder and Denver Java User Groups. Here is the session description: Java 8’s lambdas make building Reactive applications a whole lot easier and cleaner. Through copious code examples this session will show you how to build event-driven, scalable, resilient, and responsive applications with Java 8, Play Framework and Akka. On the web side you will learn about using lambdas for async & non-blocking requests & WebSockets.

Going Reactive with Java 8 – Tonight at Triangle JUG

Tonight I will be presenting Going Reactive with Java 8 at the Triangle Java Users Group. Here is the session description: Java 8’s lambdas make building Reactive applications a whole lot easier and cleaner. Through copious code examples this session will show you how to build event-driven, scalable, resilient, and responsive applications with Java 8, Play Framework and Akka. On the web side you will learn about using lambdas for async & non-blocking requests & WebSockets.

Presenting in SF: sbt-web & Reactive All the Way Down

This week I will be presenting twice in San Francisco at SF Scala: Thursday April 10: Introducing sbt-web - A Node & WebJar Compatible Asset Pipeline for the Typesafe Platform sbt-web is a new web asset pipeline for Play Framework and other sbt-based frameworks. It can pull dependencies from both Node and WebJars. The pipeline covers all of the phases of client-side development, including: linting, compiling (CoffeeScript, LESS, etc), minification, concatenation, fingerprinting, and gzipping.

Presenting Building Reactive Apps in Denver

This Thursday (March 20, 2014) I will be presenting Building Reactive Apps at the Reactive Programming Enthusiasts Denver. Here is the session description: Non-blocking, asynchronous, and reactive programming models are all the rage today. This session will explore in-depth why these patterns are important in modern apps. We will drill down and see how to apply them to event-driven web, mobile, and RESTful apps. To illustrate the concepts, we will use Java, Scala, Akka, and the Play Framework as examples.